IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolec/v214y2023ics0921800923002604.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Unpacking the black box of ‘energy technology’: How abstraction and resource fungibility obscure ecologically unequal exchange

Author

Listed:
  • Hornborg, Alf

Abstract

Transitions to low-carbon energy technologies and other forms of climate mitigation tend to involve disempowerment and environmental injustices of various kinds. This paper argues that such tendencies are inherent in the social rationale of technological systems promoted by the logic of the world market. The production and operation of technological artifacts are imbued with economic rationality and must not be conceptualised as distinct from the organisation of society. This is illustrated by the energy transition that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, in which the underlying incentives of ecologically unequal exchange and environmental load displacements were transmuted into seemingly neutral concerns of economic rationality and technological progress. The distributive dimensions of markets and technologies become apparent as we now aspire to abandon the fossil energy regime, revealing how our concepts of ‘energy’ and ‘technology’ may obscure global processes of appropriation of human labour time and natural space. Such processes are as insidiously inscribed in low-carbon energy technologies as in the fossil-fueled technologies that they are intended to replace. To identify such pervasive injustices as inherent in technologies rather than contextual contingencies requires an acknowledgement of the social essence of technical artifacts. This in turn requires a deep transdisciplinarity that links physics, industrial ecology, the philosophy of technology, social theory, world trade, and the history of ideas. Current efforts to transcend the distinction between the social and the material pervasively fail to integrate social theory and physical resource theory. Rather than investigate the social and ecological repercussions of technological systems, the focus of energy justice research should be to discover the tacit, distributive functions that are inscribed in the technologies to begin with.

Suggested Citation

  • Hornborg, Alf, 2023. "Unpacking the black box of ‘energy technology’: How abstraction and resource fungibility obscure ecologically unequal exchange," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 214(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:214:y:2023:i:c:s0921800923002604
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107997
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002604
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2023.107997?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hickel, Jason & Dorninger, Christian & Wieland, Hanspeter & Suwandi, Intan, 2022. "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113823, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Sovacool, Benjamin K. & Turnheim, Bruno & Hook, Andrew & Brock, Andrea & Martiskainen, Mari, 2021. "Dispossessed by decarbonisation: Reducing vulnerability, injustice, and inequality in the lived experience of low-carbon pathways," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    3. Dorninger, Christian & Hornborg, Alf & Abson, David J. & von Wehrden, Henrik & Schaffartzik, Anke & Giljum, Stefan & Engler, John-Oliver & Feller, Robert L. & Hubacek, Klaus & Wieland, Hanspeter, 2021. "Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tausch, Luca & Althouse, Jeffrey, 2025. "Ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as a multi-tiered hierarchy: Investigating the interdependence of global and domestic environmental inequalities to explain China's rise," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 235(C).
    2. Kristian Kongshøj, 2023. "Social policy in a future of degrowth? Challenges for decommodification, commoning and public support," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-11, December.
    3. Althouse, Jeffrey & Cahen-Fourot, Louison & Carballa-Smichowski, Bruno & Durand, Cédric & Knauss, Steven, 2023. "Ecologically unequal exchange and uneven development patterns along global value chains," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    4. Olk, Christopher, 2024. "How much a dollar cost: Currency hierarchy as a driver of ecologically unequal exchange," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 180(C).
    5. Alf Hornborg, 2021. "Beyond the Image of COVID-19 as Nature’s Revenge: Understanding Globalized Capitalism through an Epidemiology of Money," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(9), pages 1-11, April.
    6. Pan, Yue & Chai, Jian & Tian, Lingyue & Zhang, Xiaokong & Wang, Jiaoyan, 2024. "Regional inequality in China's electricity trade," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 313(C).
    7. Jonathan F Cogliano & Roberto Veneziani & Naoki Yoshihara, 2024. "The dynamics of international exploitation," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 56(5), pages 1420-1446, August.
    8. Pellegris, Alban & Court, Victor, 2025. "The rise and fall of neoliberalism: Evidences from an ecological and regulationist analysis of France (1960–2020)," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 230(C).
    9. Engler, John-Oliver & Kretschmer, Max-Friedemann & Rathgens, Julius & Ament, Joe A. & Huth, Thomas & von Wehrden, Henrik, 2024. "15 years of degrowth research: A systematic review," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 218(C).
    10. Koskimäki, Teemu, 2023. "Targeting socioeconomic transformations to achieve global sustainability," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 211(C).
    11. Sovacool, Benjamin K. & Martiskainen, Mari & Furszyfer Del Rio, Dylan D., 2021. "Knowledge, energy sustainability, and vulnerability in the demographics of smart home technology diffusion," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 153(C).
    12. Mengyao Han & Shuchang Li, 2021. "Transfer Patterns and Drivers of Embodied Agricultural Land within China: Based on Multi-Regional Decomposition Analysis," Land, MDPI, vol. 10(2), pages 1-16, February.
    13. Valdecantos, Sebastian, 2025. "The green transition dilemma: The impossible (?) quest for prosperity of South American economies," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 230(C).
    14. Aloysius Suratin & Suyud Warno Utomo & Dwi Nowo Martono & Kosuke Mizuno, 2023. "Indonesia’s Renewable Natural Resource Management in the Low-Carbon Transition: A Conundrum in Changing Trajectories," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(14), pages 1-17, July.
    15. Bourdin Sebastian & Molica Francesco & Marques Santos Anabela, 2025. "Too much or not enough? The dual nature of green discontent and its geography," JRC Working Papers on Territorial Modelling and Analysis 2025-04, Joint Research Centre.
    16. Meran Georg & Schwarze Reimund, 2025. "Unveiling Ecological Unequal Exchange: The Role of Biophysical Flows as an Indicator of Ecological Exploitation in the North-South Relations," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment Journal, De Gruyter, vol. 19(1), pages 1-19.
    17. Tilsted, Joachim Peter & Bjørn, Anders & Majeau-Bettez, Guillaume & Lund, Jens Friis, 2021. "Accounting matters: Revisiting claims of decoupling and genuine green growth in Nordic countries," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    18. Hekmatpour, Peyman & Leslie, Carrie McLachlin, 2022. "Ecologically unequal exchange and disparate death rates attributable to air pollution: A comparative study of 169 countries from 1991 to 2017," OSF Preprints racms, Center for Open Science.
    19. Johnson, C. & Moore, K.R. & Johnson, D., 2024. "Maturing the concept of small-scale mining (SSM) in the Global North using concept evaluation criteria on the placer mining industry in Yukon, Canada," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    20. Lena Gerdes & Bernhard Rengs & Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle, 2022. "Labor and environment in global value chains: an evolutionary policy study with a three-sector and two-region agent-based macroeconomic model," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 32(1), pages 123-173, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:214:y:2023:i:c:s0921800923002604. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.